PIA08320: Cruising with Pan

Saturn’s small, walnut-shaped moon, Pan, embedded in the planet’s rings,
coasts along in this movie clip from the Cassini spacecraft.

The movie begins with Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) and the
rings against the night side of Saturn. Cassini stays fixed on Pan as the
moon heads toward the outside edge, or ansa, of the Encke Gap (325
kilometers, or 200 miles wide) in which it orbits. Saturn’s dark shadow
is seen stretching across the middle of the ringplane. Midway through the
sequence, the far side of the rings emerges from behind the planet, but
eventually is completely darkened by Saturn’s shadow.

The small, bright moving object that appears from the lower left, near the
end of the sequence, is a bright background star.

The 40 images in this movie were taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2006, at a distance of
approximately 209,000 kilometers (130,000 miles) from Pan. The image scale
is approximately 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.